Wednesday 29 July 2009 10.06 EDT
First published on Wednesday 29 July 2009 10.06 EDT

At hack day last year Huma Islam and I decided that we wanted to come up with a hack that didn't involve writing a single line of code.

Most of the hackers were expert developers and we didn't want our efforts to be instantly outshone by everyone else.

There's a wide range of tools for wannabe developers available all over the web that don't require programming expertise. Hack day was a brilliant opportunity to play with them and get to know what they could do.

We wanted to create something useful and as Huma is the source of great tips for restaurants, ice cream parlours and delis all over London we sought inspiration in the restaurant review pages. For instant feedback and fun we fed an rss feed of all the Guardian's restaurant reviews into Wordle which produces word clouds where the most frequently used words in the text appear more prominently.

It demonstrated that Guardian reviewers write more about chocolate than about peas and that 'goat's brilliant' (apparently), but it didn't help us reach our goal of creating something useful.

The next tool we tried was dabble db which Simon Willison had given a very enthusiastic presentation about. You can upload data from a spreadsheet and produce graphs and reports so it's a great tool for non programmers who want to create something using the Guardian's data blog.

Our ambitious plan was to load up data about food prices over the last few years and to identify patterns in what Guardian restaurant reviewers were writing about.

The first surprise was how difficult it was to find this data in a programatically readable format on the web. We enlisted the help of Simon Rogers, an expert data driven journalist. He found us a spreadsheet published by the Office of National Statistics.

We spent a lot of time cleaning it up so that it was in a format that dabble.db could use. We got as far as loading it into our database and producing some graphs before we realised that we would need more skill and time than we had available to demonstrate any sort of correlation between the panna cotta, roast pidgeon and bean curd described in the reviews with the salt, flour, beef and wheat prices from the ONS.

After a pause to eat some doughnuts as all this talk of food was making us hungry we moved onto the next webtool on our list: Yahoo pipes.

Initially, I was suspicious of the drag and drop user interface; I think I've been hanging out with real techies too long. It turned out to be a simple way to manipulate the data in the the restaurant review RSS feeds.

You can get up and running with it very quickly and this video is a useful place to start. We produced this map which displays restaurant reviews by Matthew Norman that have recently appeared in the Guardian.

Want to avoid those one-star wonder restaurants? You can with a map of Matthew Norman's restaurant reviews

We used Matthew Norman's reviews as he includes address information in his reviews fairly often which helps the Yahoo Location Extractor work out the location of the content.

It needs some tweaking so that restaurants don't randomly appear somewhere near Nice just because they serve Provencale food. Feel very free to clone it and improve it!

Here are some other tools that non technical hackers found useful. Let us know what else is out there.